Lavrynovych E. The practice of asceticism in Islamic mysticism: the genesis and manifestations

In this thesis performed a comprehensive theoretico-methodological analysis of the concepts of mystic, mysticism, asceticism, religious experience, mystical experience. This analysis showed that non-critical application of categories, developed within Western philosophy and theology, for the analysis of Islamic mysticism, particularly Sufism (as the leading mystical tradition in Islam), leads to a simplification of religious and philosophical content of Sufism, artificial reductionism in comparative analysis of Eastern and Western mystical traditions, inadequate interpretation of some basic concepts. Therefore, concepts which are traditionally used to describe the Sufism, demand their interpretation in the context of ontological, epistemological, anthropological ideas within the Sufism tradition.